With PageBuilder, you can automatically and dynamically create publications and catalogues from a DAM or PIM system. We released PageBuilder 3.4 a few weeks ago. Time to share some useful information to get started with this module.

How do I set up margins in InDesign, how to use multiple columns, what's the story with those left and right boxes? Read further to learn the answer to these questions.

Introduction

PageBuilder uses two types of files. Product templates and Master templates.
A product template is an InDesign document that determines what information will be shown about a record in the publication or catalogue and in which layout.
Master templates are used to store the common elements (e.g. chapter title) of pages in your publication. Products (created from a Product template) are pasted onto this master template.

With this basic information in mind we can continue this post.

Margins

Each product (a product is a product template filled in with specific record information from your ADAM database) is pasted to a Master template. The exact place in this document depends on the margins set up in the master.

• Always use a 'Master Page' in InDesign to setup the margins. A normal page will use the margins of the applied Master, margins of the page itself are ignored.
• It is possible to use different margins for left and right pages.

Image 1 shows different margins on a left and right page. Three products (in blue) are pasted onto the pages to give an impression of the result. Also notice that the margins are set on the A-Master.

Columns

PageBuilder also supports multiple columns on one page.

• Add the desired number of columns to the Master page (same as margins).
• Make sure that your product templates are designed for using multiple columns. The width of a prepared product should typically not exceed the width of a column in the master document.
• The order that items are arranged in the columns depends on the settings (vertical, horizontal or horizontal aligned). Detailed information about this topic can be found in the PageBuilder User Guide.

Image 2 shows three columns. Products are pasted onto the page to give an impression of the result. The first product (yellow) has a width of the whole page, the other products (blue) have the same width as a column. Again notice that the columns are set on the A-Master.

Left and Right boxes

Sometimes you'll want to create a catalogue where the layout on a left page is somewhat different than on a right page. Example: each product in your catalogue has an image and some text. For left pages you want the image left of the description, whereas on right pages the image is on the other side of the description. This will result in the example of image 3.

This is how you can achieve this:

• Create a product template that contains all three items: the image on the left page, text (center box), image on the right page.
• These boxes need to have the same width as the result would have. This results in a product template that is too big to fit in your master template. But while building, one of the boxes (left or right) will be deleted.
• Tag the left box as 'left' and the right box as 'right' using the PageBuilder Tagger (location property).

Image 4 shows a product template (blue) together with the Tagger panel.

That's it for now. In combination with the user guide, these hints will help you to easily build your desired catalogues with ADAM.

Happy Pagebuilding!